Yep we played lots of street hockey with nets in the street. Part of the game was clearing all people/sticks/balls and the two nets in <5 seconds whenever a car showed up.

All drivers in the whole neighborhood understood this as normal.

That said, as kids we’d be equally fine with a dedicated lot specifically to play various types of street ball. As long as it allowed random pickup games, always had a free spot for us, and didn’t require us to pay $100/mo each to some sports league organization.

Abundant free sports facilities for each neighborhood are fine. We don’t need to play in the literal street.

> All drivers in the whole neighborhood understood this as normal.

But the fact remains that kids get hit in suburbs more often. We feel like drivers in suburbia understand this, but the roads are actually designed to encourage speed, and accidents happen.

Yeah that neighborhood was impossible to speed like today's suburbs. Blocks were 300 ft from intersection to intersection, and no road was longer than 3 blocks. Going to my house from the main road was literally: "First left, then first right, then second left, then first right, then the third house on the left".

I did some OpenStreetMap work recently with aerial imagery in the US in such a suburb and was a bit surprised to see that the streets where people lived (not arterial roads through the suburb) were about 10 m wide. I feel the residential streets here with 5.5 m are already a bit too wide, and the main road through the village (with bus traffic and until recently lots of traffic to the motorway) is about 7 m wide.

That people tend to speed when you build a road as if it were a 100 km/h rural road doesn't seem too surprising, sadly. Now, as a parent I still think people are driving too fast, especially around the kindergarten (30 km/h speed limit doesn't automatically make that the desired default speed for that street), but it's probably night and day compared to American suburbs.

A typical two lane road is a great width for a street hockey rink

On my first trip to the US, early 2000s, my business partner and I were slowly driving around (I think) Palo Alto on a Saturday admiring the houses and he suddenly asked “WHERE ARE ALL THE CHILDREN?”

I couldn’t unsee it. This pristine suburbia, optimized for families, perfect weather, but no kids to be seen. It seemed so weird to us who’d grown up mostly outdoors. In Ireland.

So true. The Bay's suburbs are definitely lacking kids.

Mostly, I think, because those areas are where tech workers live and they tend to skew younger and childless (or few children). So you end up with tech bros crammed into single family homes, with no need for the front/back yard.

Areas around FAANG campuses really just need higher density zoning. It's stupid that the neighborhoods surrounding all Google, Apple, Amazon campuses are single family homes when there is a massive demand for tech workers to be as close to the office as possible.

Just to clarify - do you think that situation is a positive thing, negative thing, or no opinion with regards to it?

I say this as someone who grew up around some places that fit your description.

And let me emphasize that's still suburban, not rural. I live 8 minutes from a good grocery store, 30 minutes from a city of 46,000 people. Small roads aren't paved here (the nearby highway is, and the in-town streets are), and the 20 mph road maintained by nobody else but a couple of residents with tractors is 400 feet from the house.

(And the trade-off for this level of remoteness, for those wondering, is I have about 200 square miles of public lands walkable from the house without crossing a highway. Ever taken a two-hour walk from your house, with your dogs off leash, without seeing another human?)

that sounds really nice… without “blowing up the spot”, could you give a vague location?

That's really a question of pick your climate. Colorado's mountains get a lot of snow in the winter, Arizona's deserts never get really cold, Utah gets both snow and hot summers. All of Southwest has quiet spots if you look for them.

I'm an hour south of Colorado's mountain ranges, in a little pocket of microclimate where most storm clouds sweep past you on both sides, where winter still exists but where you don't need to shovel snow, and where summer days stay below 100 F. We looked at houses in 3 states before settling on this.

Look into Arizona, New Mexico, Utah (Moab is an outdoor sports mecca), California (around highway 395, and on the coast outside of big cities, are some pretty areas), Colorado (if you love skiing etc), maybe Texas (e.g. "Hill Country").

And if you want more free space, move to Wyoming or Montana (but good luck with the groceries).

We spent just under 3 years roaming the Western US with a motorhome. I've seen a lot of natural beauty, you just have to leave the cities and it's there. The rest is mostly a matter of what climate, plant life, etc you prefer, and how close do you want to live to a good hospital, groceries, UPS & mail delivery, etc.